onel who can pay
any heed to his personal safety when he is occupied as he ought to be
occupied with the absorbing desire to do his duty."

There was a great deal of self-revelation in these words. Even the
critic accustomed to ascribe to Roosevelt egotism and love of gallery
applause must concede the courage, will-power, and self-forgetfulness
disclosed by the incident.

The election was a debacle for reaction, a victory for Democracy, a
triumph in defeat for the Progressive party. Taft carried two States,
Utah and Vermont, with eight electoral votes; Woodrow Wilson carried
forty States, with 435 electoral votes; and Roosevelt carried five
States, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Washington,
and eleven out of the thirteen votes of California, giving him 88
electoral votes. Taft's popular vote was 3,484,956; Wilson's was
6,293,019; while Roosevelt's was 4,119,507. The fact that Wilson was
elected by a minority popular vote is not the significant thing, for it
is far beyond the capability of any political observer to declare what
would have been the result if there had been but two parties in the
field. The triumph for the Progressive party lay in the certainty that
its emergence had compelled the election of a President whose face was
toward the future. If the Roosevelt delegates at Chicago in June had
acquiesced in the result of the steam-roller Convention, it is highly
probable that Woodrow Wilson would not have been the choice of the
Democratic Convention that met later at Baltimore.

During the succeeding four years the Progressive party, as a national
organization, continued steadily to "dwindle, peak, and pine." More and
more of its members and supporters slipped or stepped boldly back to the
Republican party. Its quondam Democratic members had largely returned to
their former allegiance with Wilson, either at the election or after it.
Roosevelt once more withdrew from active participation in public life,
until the Great War, with its gradually increasing intrusions upon
American interests and American rights, aroused him to vigorous and
aggressive utterance on American responsibility and American duty. He
became a vigorous critic of the Administration.

Once more a demand began to spring up for his nomination for the
Presidency; the Progressive party began to show signs of reviving
consciousness. There had persisted through the years a little band of
irreconcilables who were Progressives o